Remember how you died?
How I was so far away.
How it was to watch your parents pare each other down to the bone.
How unsure it felt to be alive.
How everything else just kept circling?

In Te Paki there’s that same kind of
spiritual sadness -
a paradise being lost.
Up there in the dunes, the sky changes every minute and in one quick wind, you don’t know
where you are anymore.

We hiked up there the other week,
the sun bleeding, lungs heaving. And
I’m sure it was you who came to me. Softly in the sand-wind -
that small weight, that anchor
that followed me all that time
lifted itself up and left.